Bootstrap, front-end development

What is Bootstrap, you ask?

Sounds western doesn’t it? And the location given by one of the Bootstrap creators was San Francisco, when he signed up for Twitter back in September of 2011, and i don’t think you can get much further west than California, so maybe there was a little western influence in the naming. [4]

Speaking of Twitter, Bootstrap was created in mid-2010 and was known as Twitter Blueprint. The backstory on how it becomes open-source is best shared in their own words, “Twitter held its first Hack Week and the project exploded as developers of all skill levels jumped in without any external guidance. It served as the style guide for internal tools development at the company for over a year before its public release, and continues to do so today.”[5]

The goals of the two original developers Mark Otto and Jacob Thornton was to create a framework for consistency of design most especially for the user interface, as, up until then, their  use of libraries had “led to inconsistencies and a high maintenance burden.” [1]

Front end / Back end

So we might ask, front end – back end, what are we talking about? Let’s clarify so the significance of this is clear. In the language of the web, we have communication via the internet between clients and servers. These clients are not customers but rather the recipients of the information provided by the servers.

What has moved us into web 2.0 and with the addition of mobile devices into the so-called responsive web is the ability of having the clients (client side browser) to process information for the user rather than the user having to wait on the server to process and provide the information.

According to Mike Jewett in his blog about frontend and backend development, “Languages, frameworks, methodologies may differ, but there are two aspects of web development that will be common for all jobs: frontend and backend.” [4] So, we are addressing the front end processing for the web, which at one time was the exclusive domain of the designer. This has now changed considerably with the advent of the framework known as Bootstrap.

Frameworks

Once again SitePoint brings clarity to what could be a bit of geek-speak by explaining the changes and importance of front-end development and helps position the role of designers for the responsive web 2.0: “Responsive web design is not so hard to implement but it can be a little bit tricky to make it all work on all targeted devices. Frameworks make this job easier. They allow you to create responsive, standard-compliant websites with minimum effort while at the same time keeping everything simple and consistent. Frameworks give you a lot of benefits such as speed and simplicity, consistency across different devices . . .” [2]

Let’s have a little fun …

For those not certain what responsive design actually means, SitePoint references a site to allow you to experiment and see for yourself: “You can see just how responsive web design works at the Media Queries gallery site.” [3]  Please check it out and you can see quickly the tremendous impact of responsive web design.

And according to SitePoint, “Bootstrap is definitely the most popular and widely used framework, nowadays. It’s a beautiful, intuitive and powerful web design kit for creating cross browser, consistent and good looking interfaces. It offers many of the popular UI components with a plain-yet-elegant style, a grid system and JavaScript plugins for common scenarios.”[3]

Bootstrap is written in the language of the web

Bootstrap is written in HTML, CSS, LESS, Sass and JavaScript. It is browser based client side scripting using HTML and CSS-based design templates.[2] Bootstrap also makes use of the *GitHub repository: https://github.com/twbs/bootstrap.

*More on GitHub which, according to How-To-Geeks, is the go to place for developers: http://www.howtogeek.com/180167/htg-explains-what-is-github-and-what-do-geeks-use-it-for/

If we want to know about the forward-looking team at Bootstrap, “Originally released on Friday, August 19, 2011, we’ve since had over twenty releases, including two major rewrites with v2 and v3. With Bootstrap 2, we added responsive functionality to the entire framework as an optional stylesheet. Building on that with Bootstrap 3, we rewrote the library once more to make it responsive by default with a mobile first approach.” [1]
The keywords here, in this author’s opinion, are by default.

They are preparing for Web 3.0 and so are we …

 

Back to Top

References:

1. Bootstrap. About, n.d. Retrieved February 23, 2016, from https://getbootstrap.com/about/#team.
2. Bootstrap. Twitter, n.d. Retrieved February 23, 2016, from Twitter: https://twitter.com/getbootstrap.
3. Gerchev, Ivaylo. Top 10 Front-End Development Frameworks, June 16, 2013. Retrieved February 23, 2016 from SitePoint: http://www.sitepoint.com/top-10-front-end-development-frameworks/
4. Jewett, Mike. A Comparison of Frontend and Backend Web Development,  January 19, 2015. Retrieved February 23, 2016, from Bloc: https://blog.bloc.io/frontend-vs-backend-web-development/.
5. Wikipedia. Bootstrap (front-end framework), n.d. Retrieved February 23, 2016 from Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bootstrap_(front-end_framework).